Creating multicultural classroom environments has been one of the most challenging endeavors to face college and university campuses over the past several decades. To help instructors address individual course innovation and teaching development goals related to diversity, teachers, faculty and instructional developers, and academic administrators have developed and shared useful classroom-based strategies and resources. More recently, however, teaching centers, faculty, and instructional developers have been called upon to structure similar opportunities (e.g., consultation support, programming) to foster the collegiality and collaboration necessary for multicultural change goals at the department, college, and university-wide levels.

Our contemporary challenge is to align faculty and organizational development for diversity initiatives within the context of campus cultures. Understandably, many individual faculty members who witnessed and/or participated in social justice and diversity programs during the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s can be susceptible to a "been there, done that" attitude about such initiatives. However, the lack of substantive progress on these issues points to our collective need for open, ongoing dialogues that introduce new tools of analysis and fresh strategies for sustaining such change efforts.

Teaching Inclusively brings together a broad array of current "best practices" in the design, implementation, and assessment of faculty development opportunities oriented toward more inclusive teaching and learning environments. This volume advocates for more transparent connections between change initiatives at individual, departmental, and college-wide levels by highlighting the ways in which such practices and change goals can relate to and support each other, thus addressing a noticeable absence in the current available literature. The contributors to this volume present readers with a balance between theoretical models and demonstration projects that address change processes at three levels: individual courses, programs and departments, and across schools and institutions. In addition, there are descriptions of current, multi-year or multi-phase efforts at both departmental and organizational levels. Whenever possible, the contributors include their perspectives on important lessons learned from their efforts. Finally, we offer resource materials that promise concrete support for applications.

Part I addresses models and perspectives that help to conceptualize, implement and assess diversity-related instructional and faculty development programs at the systemic level. Contributors offer models and descriptions of practices aimed at making transparent the values, beliefs, and goals that shape institutional and classroom climates. Note that in the context of this volume, "diversity" is deliberately defined broadly to encourage a more systemic approach to the analyses of and response to diversity-related issues. For many readers, this may offer new dimensions and greater texture to their current conceptualization of diversity. This section reflects the contributors’ interests in analytical tools and organizational frameworks useful in addressing individual, departmental, and institutional changes. Whenever appropriate, authors in this section identify a range of practical applications, such as course-based efforts in the major to courses that fulfill general education requirements.

In Part II, contributors describe change initiatives that use departments (or programs) as the unit of analysis for diversity-related change efforts. In this section, readers will benefit from the descriptions and assessments of programs designed specifically to bring faculty and academic administrators together in cohorts to address diversity and teaching development goals within the disciplines in a sustained dialogue on diversity. Assessment of current efforts indicate that such initiatives illuminate the content, skills, and values necessary for sustained change and that such experiences can become important models for broader institutional change efforts.

In Part III, the contributors discuss multicultural change efforts at the college or institutional level directed at creating and sustaining more inclusive teaching and learning communities. Additionally, contributors describe programs and practices useful in addressing diversity issues across the disciplines as well as within discipline-specific contexts. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding how systematic multicultural organizational change can support a departmental or campus-wide emphasis on teaching inclusively. These chapters offer rich descriptions of efforts at institutions learning how to address diversity-related initiatives in a sustainable, comprehensive manner. Such efforts can help others determine how best to assess their organization’s needs and strengths, and to determine what is needed in the larger environment to initiate and sustain successful pro-equity organizational change and innovations.

Finally, Part IV pays particular attention to resources and program models particularly useful for faculty developers and centers. Contributors to this section provide a rich set of tools for self- and course-assessment, planning for new or revised programs, and suggesting well-proven strategies for approaches to diversity-related teaching development and organizational change initiatives. These include descriptions of specific, "hands on" consultation practices, workshop exercises, resource materials, and design elements (e.g., use of writing prompts) proven effective across the disciplines in engaging faculty in reflection, analysis, dialogue and innovation related to diversity-related teaching development goals.

In conclusion, this volume seeks to respond to the challenge of initiating fresh, results-oriented, and context-specific dialogues on teaching inclusively by providing an overview of effective faculty, instructional, and organizational development programs that address a wide range of diversity-related goals. By highlighting the "best practices" of change on the individual, departmental, and institutional levels in the same volume, the editors hope that readers will more clearly see the possibilities and intersectionality of diversity initiatives on their campuses, and beyond.

A project of this scope is necessarily a collective effort. I begin by thanking all of the contributing authors for their generosity and spirit of collaboration. Colleagues from the University of Massachusetts Amherst that offered enormous support and guidance to this project include Heather Bourne, Sean Robins, and Sarah Bramley; Mary Deane Sorcinelli, Bailey Jackson, Pat Griffin, Maurianne Adams, and Barbara Love; Laura Wright, and Jung Yun (editors extraordinaire). I thank Anne Miller who understands how to lead organizational change better than anyone else I know. More broadly, I also thank Nancy Ramsay, Christine Stanley, Thomas S. Edwards, Lisa Kornetsky and Rebecca Leonard who all helped to keep this project on the right theoretical and practical tracks. My long-standing partner in teaching, Edith Fraser, and our Smith College colleagues, Kathryn Basham, Mary Hall, Mary Gannon, Alex Deschamps, Josh Miller, Ann Marie Garran, Victor Mealy and Lois Bass, contributed invaluably by their ongoing friendships and willingness to share their personal and collective insights and strategies. And finally, but most importantly, I thank Ronald G. Parent.

Mathew L. Ouellett

University of Massachusetts Amherst, April 14, 2005